Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)

Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 10, 2006 17:29 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
Parent article: Linux printing: much done and more to do (Linux.com)

The article seemed a little innacurate though. Back in the dark days of LPR PCL printers were the
easiest to support and ghostscript could RIP to it from PostScript. CUPS has done a lot to make
printing more reasonable, better than most systems, and was also picked up by Apple as the
standard system for Mac OS X which helps a great deal in ensuring proper support for the most
devices. There are plenty of CUPS based print servers out there and plenty of Mac and Linux
workstations that use them. Manufacturers do respond to an installed base.

What would be nice if Windows supported IPP properly. CUPS has these nice IPP broadcast
messages so that only the host that is actually connected to the printer needs to know anything
about it, everything else just automagically sees it and can print to it. This works _great_ on Mac
and Linux, but not on Windows. In my house the one Windows laptop is always having printing
trouble, where the Linux and Mac hosts have no problems unless the printer is turned off 8^).

Unfortunately printing is still a PITA in practice, although CUPS has made it better overall.

---

(Log in to post comments)